Contemporary Social Science Research Research Articles

Research-Based Practices to Engage Youth in a Vibrant Catholic Church: The Case for Implementing Sacred Listening Practices

This article explores the theological and practical implications of Sacred Listening, a concept developed in response to the Synod on Synodality initiated by Pope Francis. The Synod emphasizes the church’s call to a more relational and participatory ecclesial life, rooted in listening, dialogue, and accompaniment. Sacred Listening is proposed as a theologically grounded practice designed to rebuild trust and foster deeper connections within the faith community, particularly in a low-trust environment. Drawing on the theological principles of Imago Dei, as well as contemporary social science research, the article presents Sacred Listening as a means to move beyond traditional modes of institutional authority toward relational trust and authentic engagement. The article further introduces practical tools that operationalize these principles, providing concrete strategies for religious leaders to engage with their communities more effectively. This work contributes to the ongoing theological discourse on synodality and offers a framework for creating a more inclusive and responsive church in today’s complex social landscape.

How is the platform a workplace? Moving from sites to infrastructure

AbstractPlatforms indicate a partial but critical shift from the workplace as site to the workplace as infrastructure. Instead of focusing on platforms as mediators of labour, this article asks: how is the platform a workplace? Platforms involve a distinctive geography, creating flexible space that challenges clear distinctions between the inside and outside of the workplace and its action. It is this issue of the location of the structure for action in platformised work that is the problem of infrastructure. Infrastructure, as studies in information work have demonstrated, exists through practices that resolve the tensions between broader structures for activity and specific enactments. The implications of this workplace infrastructure approach have not yet been fully addressed in contemporary social science research on platforms and work. The article begins by outlining how workplaces are not simply sites where work occurs but rather contingently structure work. It then shows how infrastructure names the socio‐technical constitution of this contingent structuring of workplaces, which allows both standardisation and flexibility in information work. These two insights are combined in the infrastructural qualities of platforms that produce workplaces as contingent structures, with the socio‐technical practices of arrangement and coordination as the spatial drivers of workplace flexibility. As infrastructure, the platform workplace is understood as compositor of work; its parameters shape the occurrence of working activity, at the same time as work taking place also alters the parameters of the workplace. This infrastructural approach illuminates other agencies shaping work beyond employer and employee, in turn implying that the study of platform workplaces as infrastructure can shed light on the functioning of contemporary economic activities beyond work.

Integration of survey data and digital footprints: an overview of the main methodological approaches

The main purpose of current study is to review the main existing methodological approaches to the integration of survey data and digital traces that are used in sociological research. The paper examines key arguments in the current methodological discussion about the place of big digital data in contemporary social science research. The authors make an attempt to scrutinize the practice of integrating survey data and digital traces through the concept of “reactive – nonreactive” measurement. The possible functions of digital traces in the design of the study are indicated (on the example of social media data). On the example of three research areas (the study of media consumption, media effects and electoral behavior) general methodological principles for integrating data of different nature are demonstrated and possible prospects for the development of these approaches is described. The article discusses a wide range of methodological issues: problems of the data linking validity; potential threats to the validity of digital traces; opportunities to improve survey questionnaire, to enrich data, to search for new valid indicators of socio-political processes and to provide cross-validation of research results. The current practices of integrating administrative data are considered as well.

Theory, Comparison, and Design: A Review Essay

Three recent books introduce political scientists to important debates and conceptual challenges for contemporary social science research. Rather than proposing new methods, these books propose new frameworks that their authors believe should guide current practice. The authors and editors seek to guide researchers through the research process, from asking questions and proposing theories to operationalizing concepts and executing comparative research designs. Reading the three books together will give researchers a comprehensive overview of the state of the discipline on important questions like how and what to compare, what social science concepts should refer to, and how to proceed when theory and empirics disagree.

The challenge of institutionalised complicity: Researching the pharmaceutical industry in the era of impact and engagement.

The pharmaceutical industry plays a central role in the production of the drugs we use to treat most illnesses. It is immensely powerful and has received sustained attention from sociologists of health and illness, who have provided a critique of its influence and sometimes unethical behaviour. However, in recent years, funders are increasingly expecting researchers to engage and collaborate with stakeholders, including industry. This raises important questions about the institutionalisation of complicity and the different forms this might take. This article asks: How can sociologists engage with the pharmaceutical industry in a positive and constructive manner, whilst remaining independent, principled and critical? It will draw on my experience of establishing a major project on high-priced drugs for rare diseases and the literature on collaboration, stakeholder engagement and responsible research to propose a methodological framework to address this challenge. This is based on six PRIMES: (normative) Principles, Reflection and Independence, (field) Mapping, (careful) Engagement and Strategic intervention that have broad applications to many other areas of contemporary social science research.

Review of Ayse Çaǧlar and Nina Glick Schiller 2018: Migrants and City-Making: Dispossession, Displacement, and Urban Regeneration. Durham, NC: Duke University Press

Migrants and City-Making is a path-breaking study of some of the key components of contemporary social science research. It provides a robust assessment of the analytic, methodological and comparative aspects of urban social life that residents construct, arguing that natives and migrants make cities together and therefore need to be located within the same […]

‘They are Alone in Their Parenthood’: Parenting Support and (Re)building Community

This article uniquely contributes to critical discussions about parenting support in contemporary social science research that has examined the recent political and public attention on parenting. The studies highlight the increased attention on individualised parenting support focused on the parent–child relationship. Based on an analysis of 310 family support projects initiated in Finland, this research found that another orientation exists alongside individualised parenting support, which has gained only little attention in recent studies about parenting support. That alternative focuses on a communal parenting support, wherein parenting support is conducted by means of community (re)building. This article summarises how anxiety about parenting overlaps with discussions about community as well as ‘the family decline’, creating a need for community (re)building. In this study, I show how concern within family support projects is harnessed to establish ‘communion’, representing a third category alongside the more common sociological notions of ‘society’ and ‘community’. However, fundamental tensions appear as projects attempt to build community, which I also discuss in this article.

When less conditioning provides better estimates: overcontrol and endogenous selection biases in research on intergenerational mobility

The counterfactual approach to causality has become the dominant approach to understand causality in contemporary social science research. Whilst most sociologists are aware that unobserved, confounding variables may bias the estimates of causal effects (omitted variable bias), the threats of overcontrol and endogenous selection biases are less well known. In particular, widely used practices in research on intergenerational mobility are affected by these biases. I review four of these practices from the viewpoint of the counterfactual approach to causality and show why overcontrol and endogenous selection biases arise when these practices are implemented. I use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) to demonstrate the practical consequences of these biases for conclusions about intergenerational mobility. I conclude that future research on intergenerational mobility should reflect more upon the possibilities of bias introduced by conditioning on variables.

Turning Crisis into Opportunities: How a Firm Can Enrich Its Business Operations Using Artificial Intelligence and Big Data during COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has severe impacts on global health and social and economic safety. The present study discusses strategies for turning the COVID-19 crisis into opportunities to use artificial intelligence (AI) and big data in business operations. Based on the shared experience and theoretical ground, researchers identified five major business challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic: production and supply-chain disruption, appropriate business model selection, inventory management, budget planning, and workforce management. These five challenges were outlined with eight business cases as examples of companies that had already utilized AI and big data for their business operations during the COVID-19 pandemic. The outcomes of this study provide valuable insights into contemporary social science research and business management with AI and big data applications as a business response to any crisis in the future.

Divided Parties, Separated Parties

Time and again, the fate of important policies rises or falls on divisions within each of the two major political parties. Even in our polarized age, momentous changes to our healthcare system, environmental laws, and immigration regime hinge on intraparty debates. The same is true for deep constitutional questions. Consider that, when Donald Trump refused to concede the 2020 election, attention quickly turned to Republican officeholders. Would they back the president’s dangerous gambit and undermine the nation’s commitment to the peaceful transfer of power? Or refuse to go along, reinforcing this foundational norm? In one important respect, this precarious moment in constitutional history is not atypical. It reminds us that what happens within political parties matters to constitutional law at least as much as what happens between them. And yet, studies exploring parties and their constitutional significance focus exclusively on fights between Democrats and Republicans. As this Article argues, the fate of our constitutional system rests—for better, and often for worse—on whether (and how well) parties stick together. Take the conventional wisdom that Congress and the president will defend their institutional turf most vigorously when they are controlled by rival parties. This account assumes that members of the majority party in Congress can overcome their differences to check the executive. But how exactly this happens warrants close attention. Indeed, drawing on contemporary social science research, the Article argues that even as the two parties have grown apart, it remains difficult for party leaders to keep their members in line. The consequences are stark. For if members of the majority party in Congress are unable to reach accord, it is unlikely they will muster the collective strength to rebuff the executive. For these reasons, the tools that party leaders use to quell or disguise party divisions, and those their rank and file use to fight back, are crucial components of the “small-c” constitution. Given the key role party divisions play in structuring our democracy, they necessarily bear on the exercise of the judicial power under Article III. As this Article argues, better understanding how party divisions are resolved can help shed light on two central debates in contemporary public law: whether courts should update statutes when Congress can’t or won’t, and how courts should treat congressional silence when presidents act in ways not specifically prohibited by law. Attending to party divisions provides a blueprint for how we might strengthen our constitutional system so that it is sufficiently supple to respond to pressing problems, yet rigid enough to resist more ephemeral political trends. Stepping back, the Article concludes by making the case that anxiety over factionalism has gone too far. It argues that party divisions can ensure that elected officeholders—whether at the federal or state level—are responsive to majority will. They can also maintain the Constitution’s carefully crafted balance between stasis and energy. So, too, they can allow for a wider range of ideas to be discussed within each party, making it more likely that policymakers will find creative and effective solutions to difficult problems.

Toward an ethical Black men’s feminism

Rejecting the objectivity that is privileged in contemporary education and social science research, analyses of subjectivity and the self are central to Black feminist research. I take up this attention to subjectivity in an effort to consider men’s engagement with feminisms. Specifically, I am interested in how Black men responsibly and ethically participate in the work of Black feminisms. To do so, I interrogate readings of Black masculinity through Black feminist auto/ethnography. I expound on a methodological intervention that I term limbos in the wake with respect to the gendered privileges inherited by Black cisgender men.

Bigger than Football: Fan Anxiety and Memory in the Racial Present

ABSTRACT Understanding many white football fans' responses to football players' protests against police brutality requires recognizing the historical and contemporary role of football fandom in managing racial and gendered anxieties. In this article, I analyze three distinct uses of memory by white football fans as they work through the anxiety that results when the sport fails to work in the way they expect. My analysis draws on the opposing views of football taken by the American philosophers Josiah Royce and George Santayana and on contemporary social science research on the behavior of sports fans. I show that contemporary fan hostility to protesting players is consistent with the social ills that have surrounded football since the era of Royce's critique.

VULNERABILITY AND THE INTERNATIONAL LAW COMMISSION'S DRAFT ARTICLES ON THE PROTECTION OF PERSONS IN THE EVENT OF DISASTERS

AbstractThis article ponders the possibilities existing for legal re-understandings of vulnerability and adopts the International Law Commission's Draft Articles on the Protection of Persons in the Event of Disasters (2016) as its principal discursive context. Despite some promise and potential, the draft Articles retreated to conservative understandings of disaster-vulnerability and missed an opportunity for a sophisticated formulation. This article argues for disaster law's engagement with contemporary social science research. The work of critical geographers, historians and anthropologists in political ecology is particularly apposite. By rejecting geophysical outlooks in favour of structuralist understandings of disaster-vulnerability, such research facilitates consideration of interrelated histories and the role of economics in producing disaster-vulnerability. This article argues that such perspectives allow for reconsideration of current legal understandings regarding disaster-vulnerability (particularly in relation to international cooperation and risk and reduction) and thereby offer some promise for enriching disaster law's comprehensiveness and relevance.

«In Our Universities, Sociologists Are not Taught to Theorize» (interview with G.A. Kliucharev)

Interview with Sociological Studies Editor -in-Chief Professor G.A. Kliucharev touches upon some key issues of editorial policies, as well as problems of engagements with the authors, of outlook for the journal development, etc. Themes of methodology and methods were discussed, ranging from Big Data to social ontology. Interdisciplinarity, so the interviewee, is a basic attribute of contemporary social science research. Also the issue of promising lines for Russian sociology is debated, along with the crucial knots of sociologists’ education, including postgraduate and postdoctoral one – within the framework of Lifelong learning and competencies of graduate sociologists.

‘Shit is hard, yo’: young people making a living in the creative industries

ABSTRACT Contemporary social science research on the creative industries demonstrates inequities in accessing good work in this field. Nonetheless, youth still increasingly are seeking to create careers in these fields. However, economic indicators that register growing employment in the creative industries may not fully register the participation of youth. The Young People Making a Living in the Creative Industries research project sought to document the multiple income streams that youth draw on while attempting to make a living in creative fields, mapping the areas of challenge and success in the entry years to creative work. Respondents in the research project articulated an informed knowingness and resistance to the norms of unpaid work in the creative industries and forwarded gender and race as structural categories that impact the experience of entry-level creative work. Respondents also articulated forming communities of care to respond to these challenges, including collectives, support groups, and other forms of networks, while highlighting the challenge of balancing community-based and economic motivations for creative industries work. The study highlights the role of community youth arts programmes on creative industries career incubation for youth, and the need to hear from youth themselves to better map youth participation in the creative industries.

Atomistinės šeimos struktūros įtaka ugdymui: kaip šeimos atomizacija kenkia kritiškai mąstančių piliečių ugdymui paverčiant žmones pažeidžiamais indoktrinacijos ir propagandos

Remiantis istoriniais ir sociologiniais tyrimais, šiame straipsnyje išsakoma filosofiškai pagrįsta tezė, kad šeimos struktūros atomizacija lemia neigiamus ugdymo padarinius. Bolševikų socialinio eksperimento pavyzdžiu iliustruojama Carle’o Zimmermano su atomistine šeimos struktūra siejama socialinio priežastingumo teorija, kuri, kaip rodo šiuolaikiniai socialinių mokslų tyrimai, dažnai taikoma šiuolaikinės Vakarų šeimos atomizacijos procese. Siekiama išsiaiškinti, kaip šeimos atomizacija pakerta vaikų, kaip savarankiškų ir kritiškai mąstančių piliečių, ugdymą. Kai ima irti norminės santuokos ir šeimos struktūros, pažeidžiamos vaikų teisės į tapatumo formavimąsi ir santykius šeimoje. Šį pažeidimą vaikai dažnai išgyvena kaip atmetimą, kuris žeidžia vaikus moraliai ir pakerta jų tikėjimą moralės normomis. Be to, šeimos iširimas sukelia vaikams emocinę ir moralinę deprivaciją, o ši silpnina jų ontologinį saugumą ir neleidžia jiems užaugti savarankiškais, dorais ir kritiškai mąstančiais piliečiais. Dėl tokios deprivacijos vaikai patiria emocinę propagandoje ir indoktrinacijoje pasitelkiamų kultūrinių mitų įtaką, jų orientacija tampa eksternali, prarandamas gebėjimas savarankiškai galvoti ir moraliai veikti. Kadangi piliečių nuomonė ir požiūris yra veikiami iš išorės, jie nesugeba veikti kaip atsvara valdančiam elitui, todėl demokratija pavirsta elito valdymu.

Bad Girls: Young Women, Sex, and Rebellion before the Sixties by Amanda H. Littauer

Reviewed by: Bad Girls: Young Women, Sex, and Rebellion before the Sixties by Amanda H. Littauer Carrie Settle Hagan Bad Girls: Young Women, Sex, and Rebellion before the Sixties. By Amanda H. Littauer. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. v + 280 pp. Paper $27.95, e-book $26.99. This engrossing study combines five accounts of “rebellious” young women and girls who navigated, adapted, and confronted conflicting moral messages and efforts to regulate sexual behavior amidst changing American sexual codes between World War II and the end of the 1950s. Focusing on diverse women [End Page 132] and a range of expert voices, Littauer shows how individuals experienced and challenged attempts to contain their sexual choices. Through unorganized actions, youthful female sexual agency exposed deep contradictions between prescription and practice, and helped propel America towards what John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman termed “sexual liberalism.” Bad Girls connects the war and postwar period to early twentieth-century sexual shifts and foreshadows the late 1960s upheavals. By tracing 1940s and 1950s developments in both action and attitude, Littauer sees a longer “sexual evolution” over a quicker “revolution” (142). In contrast to earlier literature, Littauer argues continuity existed in premarital sexual behavior and standards (rather than a brief wartime breach and postwar retrenchment to conservatism), contributing to new scholarship documenting significant rebellion, change, and liberalism in the “conservative” 1950s. Chapter 1 frames the war as permanently opening up new possibilities for “sexual self-assertion” for young women and girls who flipped the sexual script through dogged pursuit of adventure and economic opportunities (19). Extending recent work on “Victory Girls,” Littauer offers unique spatial analysis of the booming wartime sexual culture and explores the emotional and economic motivations of young women within it, demonstrating the ways that—by refusal to curtail their (very public) actions—they “widened the gap between sexual conduct and standards” (51). The drink-soliciting B-girls of chapter 2 also claimed new visible space for women within San Francisco taverns and bars during wartime and after and blurred the lines between commercial and casual sex by exploiting the illusion that they were not sex workers but career girls seeking post-work drinks. These women navigated the dangers of arrest, sexual violence, and economic exploitation through a professional subculture providing strategies and networks of support, surviving bouts of reform and regulation to maintain their economic livelihood. Chapter 3 is Littauer’s strongest case for women’s roles in shaping sexual standards, investigating their written contributions to the public debates surrounding Alfred Kinsey’s reports on the sexual practices of Americans, participation in his research, and the contradictions in their own sexual experiences. Their accounts, coupled with Kinsey’s revelation of illicit-but-common sexual practices, made visible the “sexual hypocrisy of post-war culture” and the challenges of interpreting conflicting and competing sources of authority (134). Chapter 4 builds on the work of Beth Bailey and Elaine Tyler May, who rooted the widespread practice of “going steady” within the Cold War search for stability-through-domesticity, through substantial engagement with contemporary experts’ discussion of a new “permissive with affection” standard [End Page 133] that purportedly legitimized some youthful sexual exploration within relationships. Littauer’s close analysis of clinical studies provides glimpses of youth and their families, showing that “going steady” and being “in love” were flexible categories, though not without consequence. The final chapter examines the contributions of queer teenage girls, whose “failure” to achieve mature adulthood (as theorized by postwar social science) confounded heterosexual gender norms, while partaking in the pleasures of sex and domesticity. Not yet politicized advocates, these young lesbians—revealed through secondary oral histories and clinical studies—created nascent queer identities, resourcefully pursued information, and formed crucial ties to other lesbians that sustained them in a dangerous era. Bad Girls contains compelling arguments, but Littauer has difficulty supporting causality between individual acts and widespread change in belief and policy, in part because change over time is ambiguous and empirical evidence tenuous, and several subsections seem disconnected from historiography. Overall, her sources are wonderfully extensive, encompassing a wealth of popular media; contemporary social science research; and oral histories, memoirs, and personal letters. However, supporting selections...

Social philosophy curriculum in social science and humanities structured doctoral programmes

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to describe an experiment in a non-credit bearing series of social philosophy workshops offered to social science and humanities disciplines in an Australian university. Design/methodology/approach The paper outlines the design rationale and learning objectives for the workshop series. The data set includes qualitative student responses to 501 post-workshop questionnaires and 14 in-depth qualitative responses to a follow-up online questionnaire. Findings The data suggest that social philosophy methodology curriculum offered within a multi-discipline peer context can facilitate an appreciation among students of the centrality of theory and the value of diverse discipline approaches in research. The last part of the paper explores what underpins this – a kind of un-learning or uncertainty regarding the veracity of different philosophical approaches to research, tied to a de-centring of research subjectivity that allows for the co-existence of multiple voices. Language learning, the inclusion of post-modern perspectives and an unbiased presentation of a wide range of thinkers within a challenging intellectual context are central to this. Research limitations/implications The emerging trend towards university-wide doctoral training offers opportunities for useful innovations in research education. University-wide social philosophy curriculum can play a role in facilitating constructive negotiation of theoretical complexity both within and across social science and humanities disciplines. Originality/value The contemporary social science and humanities research context is a challenging space, characterised by intra-discipline methodological plurality, and the risk of marginalisation by more dominant instrumentalist, end-user and science-driven perspectives. The trend towards bringing different methodological perspectives together within inter-disciplinary research and team supervision of doctoral students can lead to conceptual misunderstanding and research delays. The capacity to negotiate and translate conceptual perspectives, often within complex research relationships, has then become an increasingly important academic skill. Within this context, university-wide doctoral training has emerged, but there has been little discussion of doctoral curricula beyond that devised for professional doctorates within the discipline in the non-US higher education literature. This paper contributes to emerging scholarship on research education by describing the sorts of relational, textual and conceptual processes that might be created in the multi-discipline social science and humanities context to produce an appreciation for the different philosophical foundations of research knowledge.

The New Empiricism of the Fractal Fold

A new configuration of social science is emerging in these digital times, as we tap into new kinds of data that trouble conventions regarding what constitutes the unit of analysis, and question the extent to which these data are owned or even correlated to a definitive organic and individuated subject customarily referred to as “human.” These methodological shifts demand a more careful consideration of the historical lineage of empiricism and its relation to the history of science more generally. In this article, I track the historical mutations of monadology, an ontology well suited to empiricism in these digital times. Both Gilles Deleuze and Bruno Latour ascribe to variants of monadology in their proposals for a new empiricism, drawing extensively on the work of Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904), a French sociologist, judge, and author of the audacious post-humanist 1895 text Sociology and Monadology. In this article, I discuss how monadology helps us rethink research methods in these digital times. I argue that a fractal monadology re-assembles the fold with the digital, the continuous with the discrete, and ultimately offers a philosophical foundation for contemporary social science research.

Hybridity: A Theory of Agency in Early Childhood Governance

Contemporary social science research concerning governance tends to take an institutional perspective that privileges structural analysis. The resulting body of literature has an emphasis on classification, typologies and regimes. This approach has been criticized on the basis that it neglects the role of agency and context when research concerns complex and heterogeneous community governance cases. An emerging literature on hybridity in social services aims to address the limitations of structural accounts by acknowledging that diverse logics, ideas, and norms influence the way community based social services resist or adapt in turbulent policy environments. This article considers the strengths and limitations of hybridity in development of a research framework incorporating structure, agency and ideas. The relevance of hybridity theory for the Kids in Communities study—an Australian research project investigating neighborhood influences on child development across multiple case study sites—is evaluated.